Mobile Computing Industry
Biggest share winner: Other.
The trend toward ZTE, Huawei and others taking volume share from the traditional incumbents continues. Smartphones continue to capture value share. Dedicated smartphone vendors HTC, RIM and Apple would make up the third biggest single vendor, starting from a very small base.
Looking over this three and a half year period, the change in the market is quite dramatic.
Nokia must compete on an ecosystem to ecosystem basis.
In addition to great device experiences we must build, capitalize and/or join a competitive ecosystem. The ecosystem approach we select must be comprehensive and cover a wide range of utilities and services that customers expect today and anticipate in the future.
Nokia CEO Discusses Q4 2010 Results – Earnings Call Transcript – Seeking Alpha
These kind of statements are signaling that there will be fundamental changes announced.
Here are my guesses for the February 11 announcement: Continue reading “Predictions on Nokia's new platform strategy: new OS for the US”
‘Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync,’ said Chiam. ‘With screen sizes of seven inches or above, ample processing power, and a growing number of applications, pads offer a computing experience comparable to netbooks. They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist. As with smart phones, some users will require a physical keyboard, while others will do without.’
‘Each new product category typically causes a significant shift in market shares,’ said Chiam. ‘Apple is benefiting from pads, just as Acer, Samsung and Asus previously did with netbooks. The PC industry has always evolved this way, starting when Toshiba and Compaq rode high on the original notebook wave.’
via Canalys reports global PC market growth of 19% in Q4 2010 (Canalys research release: r2011012).
Five years ago, back when Gartner and IDC were confused about what a smartphone was Canalys was on top of the market and was the first to correctly describe the smartphone.
Kudos for being first again to recognize a re-defined market.
Thanks to David Chu for forwarding the data that made this possible and reader Narajanan for spotting the divergence in platform efficiency.
iOS and Android are both growing rapidly. According to Gartner, during the first three quarters of 2010, about 44 million iOS devices and 36 million Android devices were put into use. That’s 80 million devices. An amazing achievement for two platforms that did not exist 3 years earlier.
But obviously not all devices are used the same way. Devices which have unused capabilities limit network effects for a platform and for the category of product in general. Question is: how can we measure the “smartness” of a device; how much more likely is a device to be used as a mobile computer vs. being a regular phone?
The best proxy I can think of is a measurement of browsing use. Continue reading “Is Android more efficient than iOS at generating search revenue?”
A month ago I wrote an exposé on the problems I felt Verizon was facing with their smartphone strategy: Verizon Strikes Out in Smartphones [Updated]
Given new information on subscriber growth and the relationship between Verizon and Apple, it’s time to look back and assess how the conclusions are standing up.
The conclusions I drew were that Verizon had three strikes against them:
Continue reading “Verizon back at bat: Revisiting the last inning”
Chief Executive Philipp Humm said in an interview that many of his smartphones will eventually be made up of Google-powered phones costing less than $100, half as much as the smartphones typically available at U.S. carriers. In October, to lower the cost of monthly bills, Mr. Humm introduced a limited data plan that costs $10.
via T-Mobile Smartphones to Head Down Market – WSJ.com.
T-Mobile seems to be attempting to differentiate on price. In a regular market reaching saturation that might be a viable strategy. However the market is neither regular not saturated. T-Mobile’s chances of gaining large share are limited. Continue reading “Will T-Mobile's hundred dollar smartphone with ten dollar data plan win subs?”
With a market share of 31.5 percent, Nokia is still the largest vendor of handsets in the Indian market, followed by Chinese brand G’Five with about 10 percent share, IDC said on Wednesday.
via PCWorld.
No, I haven’t heard of G’Five either. The article goes on to say that there are 68 new vendors in the market accounting for 41% of total shipments. There were only five new vendors with a share of 1% in the first quarter of 2008.
It was not long ago that Nokia held over 70% of the Indian market. That market is now larger but the share for Nokia has dropped by half at least. The share was not lost to Samsung but to 63 new entrants. They managed to capture 40% of the market, roughly equal to what Nokia lost.
These new vendors will launch Android phones next year or the year after that. According to IDC, Android obtained 9.4% in the third quarter up from 2.9% y/y. The number of Android models went from 2 to 19 in the same time frame.
There are now well over 390,366 apps in the app store[1]
Since launch, December has been the month with the most apps added. In December 2008 3,800 apps were added, in 2009 25,517 and in 2010 it looks like we might get nearly 30k new apps.
That amounts to nearly 1000 new apps per day.
It also seems that 500k apps will have arrived by mid-2011. As the production of apps continues to grow one wonders if this new medium will turn out to become more popular than recorded music in terms of creative output.
[1] That includes about 65,000 inactive apps.
In a recent article I made the claim:
My bet is that by the end of 2012, it will be hard to find any branded phones which won’t run a smartphone
I also showed how pricing has evolved over the last three years.
Two days later an article in Fortune’s Google24/7 blog highlighted the possible price points of low-end smartphones: Continue reading “The $85 Smartphone and the imminent extinction of non-smartphones”
Windows Phone 7 launched on 10 devices over 60 carriers in over 30 countries with 1.5 million of channel inventory in 6 weeks. Given the breadth of distribution, that number is not huge, amounting to less than 10k phones per operator.
Curiously, Windows Mobile was still selling in significant volumes last quarter. Maybe even higher than WP7 is selling now. In Q3 2009 Canalys reported 3.6 million WinMo units sold. In Q3 2010 Gartner estimated 2.3 million were sold through to end users. Even nine months ago Windows Mobile was running at 3.7 million units or over 1.8 million every six weeks.
Microsoft also announced they have 18,000 developers with 4,000 apps on the WP7 marketplace. That’s one developer for every 83 devices in inventory.
Microsoft’s Achim Berg:
our numbers are similar to the performance of other first generation mobile platforms…
We’re comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run; Windows Phone 7 is just the beginning.
Continue reading “Microsoft's mobile effort: back to the future?”
